eBay Ireland report shows ‘two-tier online nation’

22 Jan 2008

After tracking the nationwide activity of online shoppers throughout 2007, eBay Ireland found a large discrepancy between e-commerce habits in the 26 counties.

Based on the amount of shopping carried out on eBay.ie, an e-commerce index was calculated on a per capita basis and found that while eBayers in Wicklow spend over 33pc more than the average eBay.ie member, Monaghan natives spend 35pc less than the average.

This produced a large digital divide in the index with Wicklow scoring 133 while Monaghan scored 65.

John McElligott, managing director for eBay.ie, said that as far as he was aware this e-commerce report is the first of its kind to calculate on a county-by-county basis the level of online shopping that takes place in Ireland.

While counties Wicklow, Carlow and Laois were by far the most active online shoppers in the country, Offaly, Roscommon and Monaghan trailed well behind the average.

“It is very interesting to see the variance in the levels of online activity across the country. The high level of variance between counties is somewhat unexpected,” said McElligott.

On a city-by-city basis, Dublin scored 111 on the e-commerce index, while Cork, Galway and Kilkenny scored 94, 93 and 91 respectively.

However, this study is based only on eBay purchases and does not take into account Irish shoppers using other websites for their online shopping.